Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash

I first walked into the room because I thought I was going to talk about failing my licensing exam. Failure, feeling shame, feeling the same thing I felt when I was rejected from grad school over and over again.

Years later now, with the same man, I am naked. I get naked every week, same routine, same time, same channel. It’s healing me with time, compensated with changes and it feels good. It’s an exchange that I never fully understood until I was in it. Receiving and giving as a provider of mental wellness. It was familiar and yet so unfamiliar at the same time. I knew what it was like to get naked for a man but never like this. Never to where they actually saw me. Saw me with all my flaws, with all my doubts, and my fears. Where they told me it was normal and still accepted me as I was and allowed me to cry even when the tears were there a little longer all though sometimes they never fully came out.

It’s him I’d like to thank for knowing how to get naked. For the longest I thought naked was taking my clothes off, but it’s not. He taught me how to really get naked. How to clean my soul, how to be seen for me. I had to relearn what it was like to actually know who I am there in that space.

“It was so uncomfortable because for the longest time, I avoided it.”

It was so uncomfortable because for the longest time, I avoided it. I did anything and everything I could to avoid those feelings. Those feelings of actually being naked, of actually being seen by someone. Because I really never got a chance to do that when I was growing up, when I was a kid en mi cultura, in my family, with my father. My father who never understood vulnerability.

I have so much to thank this man aside from teaching me how to get naked. Cheers to a great therapist who helped build this therapist!

I see you,

You see me,

I love you,

Zeahlot